(two excerpts)
Balys Sruoga
Construction Fever
There’s a law of nature known from ancient times: it’s extremely easy to steal from construction sites. It’s difficult to say whether or not the SS authorities were aware of this law, but in any case they observed it: they built, and they stole, on a very grand scale.
For five years thousands of people worked at constructing Stutthof Camp, yet even at the end it was far from finished. Even the most essential of the camp’s facilities were never completed. The crematorium, the gas chamber, the bathhouse, the laundry, the kitchen – all were squeezed into inadequate and unsuitable buildings.
Take the crematorium, for example. The incinerator in the crematorium could accommodate only a few corpses at a time; it was completely unsuited to such a large enterprise. There were always corpses in reserve… But then the corpses could afford to wait their turn, they weren’t pressed for time. The disgusting part was that the crematorium was made of wood, crummy boards thrown together. In this same building, next to the warehouse where they stored the corpses, the crematorium’s workers had a food locker where they kept bread, sausages and ham. They even rigged up a moonshine still on the sly. The moonshine was a necessity for them as a defence against the stench of the corpses; the authorities turned a blind eye to the still. One time the crematorium workers got blitzed, and while cooking up a batch of moonshine in the kitchenette they burned down the entire crematorium. The excess corpses were quite rank but they were still suitable for the incinerator. The remnants of the food, on the other hand, no longer passed muster, even with the crematorium specialists.
The gas chamber was also deficient. Clothing was piled inside to be deloused, but many of the pale grey beasties clung to woollen fabrics and survived to wreak fresh havoc. And when the necessity arose to poison humans with gas it was a truly difficult task. Closing people in the chamber wasn’t hard; they’d be herded in, packed tight, locked up and that was it. But releasing the gas into the chamber was terribly difficult. SS men wearing gas masks had to clamber onto the barrack’s roof and toss the gas canisters through the chimney into the incinerator. From the incinerator, the gas drifted quite lazily into the chamber, in no hurry to fulfil its assignment. The chimney itself had to be hermetically sealed so the fumes wouldn’t escape and go to waste. After enough time had elapsed, the fumes had to be dispersed – and the SS had to mount the roof again like cats in heat. In short, the situation was complicated.
The authorities had been concerned with this inefficient state of affairs for a long time. Back in 1943, they started erecting a gigantic one-storey building in a peat bog. The building covered a huge expanse. It was to accommodate the gas chamber, the bathhouse, the kitchen, the food larder, the laundry, the office and many other facilities. Thousands of people worked on the site, but construction progressed slowly: there was always something lacking. The missing stuff would finally arrive, but by then the building material already on the site suddenly vanished. And try to find it! The devils who’d stolen it didn’t leave a trace. So the authorities struggled, swearing at the bricks and bricklayers alike.
At last a new gas chamber was successfully built, designed for both disinfecting clothing and despatching people. Several cartloads of clothes were loaded in the chamber for a trial run. The doors were locked, the furnaces ignited. The firemen barely had time to sit down and have a chat when – whooosh! – the whole chamber filled with smoke! The clothes burst into flames and left behind only a stench.
The new kitchen didn’t fare much better. Everything had been almost completely fitted; a sewage system had been installed along with central heating, waterworks and new built-in boilers. All that needed to be finished was the glass for the windowpanes plus a few other small items. But when the winter of 1944-45 set in, 500 metres of piping shattered, as well as a few hundred faucets. Someone forgot to drain the pipes. And in wartime, where were they going to get so many new pipes and taps?
Three halls of enormous size were also begun. Officially it was claimed that they were to be used to cut timber in the future, but actually they were intended to house a factory for airplane parts. They were erected right next to the prisoners’ barracks: if the enemy planes had decided to bomb, they would have had to incinerate the prisoners. But it never came to that. The halls were finished, expensive machinery was hauled inside for assembly, everything stood in readiness – when the roof fell in with a terrific crash and crushed the new machines.
With so many big projects going on, large quantities of building material were stashed in warehouses. This German building material had a peculiar property: it could melt away into thin air. Building material vanished every day. In time, the shortage of such materials became critical. Clearly someone was swiping the stuff, but how could they find the culprit? Some SS stock clerks were sent to the front, but this move didn’t replace the missing material. The authorities wracked their brains but they still couldn’t come up with a practical solution. They decided at last that there was nothing left to do: the warehouses had to be burnt.
And burn they did! A pretty sight to behold. While they were burning, however, it became evident that for some mysterious reason ammunition and other explosive materials had been hidden there. And when these started exploding there was no question of getting near enough to put out the fire. So the warehouses burned clean to the ground.
If warehouses could be so ignorant and irresponsible, how could anyone be surprised that, shortly after the warehouse inferno, the entire construction division went up in smoke, with all its plans and blueprints, all its ledgers and inventories? Ammunition exploded in this fire, too – it was as though all hell had broken loose! The cause of the fire was never discovered. It was determined that the construction division’s fire had begun in the furnaces, but the premises were empty at the time. No one was held responsible!
The bathhouse didn’t manage to burn, but it also remained unfinished.
The camp did have a sort of bathhouse, with intermittent, tepid showers capable of accommodating about a thousand, or in desperate cases two thousand people. At the end of 1944, when about 40,000 people lived in the camp, the little bathhouse was approximately as useful as a dead canary…
The prisoners took matters into their own hands. They organised bathhouses in all of the blocks – simple ones like those found in the countryside. And they rigged up bathhouses in all the barracks, no worse than the authorised ones. They improvised furnaces, laid pipes, installed faucets and anything else that was needed. And the authorities turned their backs on all this, though occasionally they’d come around, interrogate, swear a little…
‘Where did you scarecrows get these pipes?’
‘They were sent from home in packages… in the mail…’
‘Oh, and the bricks were sent from home in the mail?’
‘Oh sure, captain, sir, from home, in packages…’
‘Blöde Sauhund!’ Mayer howled. He knew perfectly well that the building material had been taken from DAW government warehouses. But according to the laws of camp life, this wasn’t theft – it was organisation.
For purposes of organisation, there was another excellent source: the SS canteen’s depots. Here the SS kept portable treasures, life’s little essentials: sheets, blankets, pillowcases, towels, underwear, overcoats, furs, soap, razors, utensils, tools and so on. The depots’ stocks were frequently renewed with confiscated prisoners’ goods, those that no one had organised on the way to the depot. With thousands upon thousands of prisoners arriving, treasures accumulated.
The SS and Gestapo would rip off certain valuables from the newcomers and haul the rest of the booty to the depot. Furthermore, various camps in Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia were being evacuated and a large share of their treasures landed in the depots. On the day fifteen typewriters were brought in from Riga, seven of them vanished without a trace. Of eight sewing machines shipped in, only two remained. The SS members who evacuated Riga tried to create an inventory for the goods they’d brought in, but this proved to be impossible: only garbage remained to be listed. At this depot it was possible at times to organise silver and gold spoons as well as rings and watches, plus bolts of English cloth for suits!
The senior depot sentry, a German SS, had a weakness for sugar moonshine, so he frequently needed to organise sacks of sugar. This snake guzzled moonshine like milk and slipped some to the other SS men. They tried to hide the fact they were swilling it; they reported for duty equally drunk. But the snake wouldn’t give prisoners even a drop. Prisoners had to organise varnish from the DAW carpenters’ workshops. This stuff made a wonderful, very thick liqueur. For the drunks, it was doubly convenient – you’d get loaded and satisfy your hunger as well.
A tremendous amount of varnish disappeared from the carpenters’ workshop, but it could still be justified somehow. The situation in the hospital was worse. The authorities, naturally, tried to spoil the alcohol by pouring gasoline and other filth in it, but the camp had wonderful chemists: they’d convert this foul filth into fragrant nectar.
‘Are they taking alcohol baths? What the hell!’ the authorities cursed, checking the alcohol accounts. But there was nothing they could do.
In the SS depots stills of sugar moonshine bubbled away. The one and only brewmaster was my dear friend Jonas, the Prot from Birzai. He cooked and cooked that sugar, but he didn’t bring me any; he swore that the snake of a stock clerk wouldn’t even let him taste his own brew. And he told the truth. Only very rarely did he return from the brewery smashed – no more than twice a week. Otherwise he was as sober as a judge. You can’t get much from a barrel with a straw!
And Jonas didn’t stink too much of moonshine; just a touch, a little bit. You could smell him from about three metres away, upwind. Occasionally, some official would want to have a chat with him. The official would shout for Jonas to come closer. He would step to within five metres of the official. The official would move closer but, like a goat, Jonas would step backwards.
‘Wait, you dirty mutt. Where are you going?’ says the official.
‘According to the laws in effect, a prisoner must keep a five metre distance from an official,’ explains my dear friend, the Prot from Birzai.
‘Not five, three,’ the official retorts.
‘Yes, you’re right. But five metres are better than three. Five metres show the authorities greater respect!’ And again Jonas steps back.
Try guessing what he reeks of!
The concentration camp was a very complex death mill. Every individual crossing over its threshold was actually already condemned to die – sooner or later. Frequent starvation, beatings, long hours of hard labour, nights of no rest, parasites, bad air – sooner or later they did their job, if some other disaster didn’t do it first, or if someone didn’t get it into his head to finish you off himself.
In such an atmosphere the cruel psyche of the camp resident matures. Thrust into a brutal environment, the instinct for survival takes over; a person scarcely has a chance to notice how he is drawn into a state of primal fear, how little by little he becomes an organically functional piece of the horror. He already views the dreadful and drastic measures he takes to do battle with the Grim Reaper as mere expedients. His ethical sense grows dull; abominable acts no longer seem so loathsome. His only desire is to live. He’ll violate his kin, snatch his last crumb of bread, shove a pal into the Grim Reaper’s embrace so that if by doing so he might himself remain alive! This hideous situation becomes the norm: once you’ve stepped on this treadmill, it’s nearly impossible to get off. It’s hard to rediscover the golden mean, hard to tell the difference between self-preservation and ruthless injury to a friend.
Oh, if only all the prisoners would understand each other and quit brutalising, beating and robbing each other – there’d be more food for everyone, the work wouldn’t be so backbreaking and daily life wouldn’t be such hell! It’s easy to say: if. What’s there to do when none of this exists, when the one or two hundred who comprehend this situation are completely helpless to change the environment, to overcome the predatory instinct that seems essential to staying alive.
In these savage struggles for survival, some drown others; breaking through to the top, they give full rein to the predatory instinct and no longer bother to pause on their way; they have more than they need to keep living. The others, the ones with no luck, unable to break through to the surface at any price, sink down in the dregs and die. You slip in the constant skirmish for life – no one extends a helping hand to lift you up. The brawlers behind you may yank you to the ground and stamp you flat, then stride or slog over you without a second look, staring all around in an idiotic terror. They feel no remorse. There’s nothing for a conscience to do, no need for one, no time to fret. Today you fell – I’ll fall tomorrow; what’s the difference? No one will bat an eye for me, either. Perhaps the most horrifying thing that camp does to a person is this inexorable erosion of every trace of what people call conscience, humaneness, simple respect.
One good thing about these surroundings is that the fear of death vanishes completely. With death a threat at every step, a person gets so used to the prospect that it becomes insignificant, trash underfoot. Death loses every vestige of nobility or tragedy. Lyricism is out of the question.
If they kill you – so they kill you; if they hang you – so they hang you. What’s the big deal?
People die in camp without anxiety. They don’t make death into a catastrophe. They’re certainly not sorry to leave this earth. It’s all the same to them.
The minute they’re dead, they’re disrobed, a number is written on their naked chests and their personal belongings are immediately stolen. The corpses are stacked just like cordwood in a shed near the hospital. The shed is tiny and the corpses don’t all fit. The extras are dumped on the ground next to the hospital. No one inquires about the cause of death, no one inspects the bodies. Only the corpse’s teeth are examined. If someone hasn’t managed to steal the gold already, an SS man extracts it with rusty pliers. He turns a fraction of the gold in to the treasury; the rest he keeps for himself.
A transport wagon arrives drawn by a dozen prisoners. The transport workers pile the corpses into a big black coffin. The coffin was built to accommodate three corpses, but five or six are stuffed into it. The lid doesn’t even close. Black and blue arms and legs, withered like twigs, stick out of the coffin; they flutter to the rhythms of the swaying wagon and wave as if beckoning passers-by. When there’s even more corpses, the coffin is dispensed with; corpses are simply piled in the wagon like slaughtered pigs bound for the butcher. One is thrown next to another; one is tossed on top. Sometimes they’re covered with a ratty gunnysack; sometimes nobody bothers. It makes no difference to the corpse, and for those of us who are still alive, it’s neither here nor there. What’s the difference?
The wagons head for the crematorium adjacent to the hospital’s windows. Day and night the crematorium belches rosy and pale yellow smoke over the camp. This smoke isn’t especially palatable. In fact it’s rank, truly rancid – a weird stink like frying rubber.
It’s a heavy smell, the smell of human meat grilling. Very heavy, day in and day out!
Near the crematorium, the corpses are heaped in a warehouse. After the moonshine brewers burned down the warehouse, the corpses had to be unloaded into a massive heap right in the yard, which was very inconvenient.
The crematorium’s incinerator was adapted for liquid fuel and the corpses burned for about two hours. In 1944 there was no liquid fuel to be found, so coke was used instead. In a coke fire the corpses burned for about six hours. At this slower rate, there was no way that the crematorium could ever manage to burn all the corpses, but there was no material left to build another one. The corpses couldn’t be buried either, because the camp stood on a swamp. Water stagnated near the surface, just two shovelfuls down. After a downpour a buried corpse would rise up out of the ground and would have to be dealt with all over again.
The crematorium workers always took the top layer of corpses, the most recent additions, to the incinerator. So the bottom layers rotted. If it weren’t for the repugnant reek, a rotted corpse would have been more convenient to stick in the incinerator. As soon as a fresh corpse was fed into the furnace, it immediately raised up its arms and legs, as if consciously warding off another corpse from entering the oven. But of course it could not be incinerated alone; others had to be shoved in, too. The uncooperative corpses caused a lot of grief: their flailing legs and arms had to be wrestled down before their neighbour could be jostled in. Decayed corpses didn’t thrash, but that smell of theirs was horrendous.
In December of 1944 and January of 1945, quite a sizeable daily surplus of corpses would accumulate – up to one and a half thousand or more. Every day two to three hundred people died. The crematorium was helpless to deal with them all. The chimney fractured from overwork and threatened to collapse from being kept so hot without respite. The dead, waiting so patiently to be burnt, were silent but hardly unnoticeable. When the weather was cold it wasn’t so bad, but when a thaw set in the camp’s mood grew foul. The stink of the corpses crept into every corner. Even boiled potatoes had a questionable flavour. Worst of all, this feckless smell had the temerity to permeate certain official abodes. Consequently it was determined that a serious battle with the corpses must be undertaken. The authorities deliberated at length but couldn’t come up with anything better than to order prisoners to dig holes in the forest, dump in the corpses, douse them with tar and burn them.
Corpses smouldered slowly in these ditches. More tar had to be frequently applied and the prisoners had to play the chef, using a pitchfork to flip the corpses like hamburgers until they were cooked to a turn. In daylight this sight was dramatic enough but at night it became an operatic spectacle!
So the little corpses smoke and smoulder, shrouding the whole camp with the fumes of frying rubber. The stokers jump around the pit with pitchforks like devils tussling with witches on Walpurgis Night!1
Serious problems cropped up here, too. As soon as night descended alien airplanes would begin to circle the camp. They didn’t actually toss bombs at the corpses but their buzzing was still unpleasant: you never knew – would they drop a bomb or were they just harassing us? Or maybe the beasts were photographing everything? It’s impossible to extinguish corpses quickly and besides, tar can’t be wasted! But due to these intimidating airplanes night work had to be halted. The burnings could only continue by day. Winter days are short. The population explosion of corpses carried on.
The corpse situation hadn’t always been so disastrous in the camp. From August to October of 1944, there were 50,000 to 60,000 prisoners in the camp, but daily deaths numbered between just three and fifteen. There were even days when no one died. No fresh corpses! The authorities were displeased with this meagre showing, naturally: how can capital invested in a crematorium remain inactive?! So the authorities manufactured corpses by artificial methods. They’d take a truck or two filled with the aged, the sick, the crippled and other weaklings, and then ‘Rat-tat-tat-tat!’ – there’s your corpses! The Jews, who had grown quite numerous in camp at this time, were heavily relied on for this project.
They weren’t always shot – bullets are made of metal after all, significantly more valuable than a corpse. The authorities more frequently resorted to gas. Of course, those being herded into the trucks were not told where they were being taken; they were lulled by an announcement that they were on their way to jobs where the food would be better. But they soon realised in what direction the gears of fate were grinding. They refused to board the truck, they wouldn’t enter the chamber; the SS had to manhandle them to get them under control.
The SS had an especially difficult time with the old jewesses. They had to be lifted into the wagon – they refused to climb aboard themselves – and then lifted out of the wagon again. Most annoying was that once they were seated in the wagon, they shouted and screamed so that the whole camp resounded: ‘Wir sind auch Menschen! We are people too!’ The SS, it seems, was of a different mind, however. Not once did the shrieks of the jewesses convince them.
The jewesses seated in the wagons weren’t the only ones who shrieked. Those left behind on the other side of the electric fence also yelled – daughters, sisters, mothers. They all shouted and screamed – some louder, some softer. SS nerves had experienced everything, but even they couldn’t tolerate this screeching for long. The SS ran out of the jewesses’ block. The prisoners, of course, had no place to run. The prisoners listened and ruminated. What they underwent while listening was their personal affair. There’s no reason for outsiders to butt in.
To stop the jewesses from ravaging any more SS nerves with their shrieks, a new means for coping with them was conceived. The jewesses would be herded on foot to a small train, so they’d believe they really were being taken to work. Next to the train stood a husky commandant’s official wearing a railroader’s uniform. He invited them most politely:
‘Please take a seat on the train, dear ladies!’
Once the jewesses were stuffed into the train, the doors were locked. As soon as the train began moving, gas was released into the cars.
This method was used only once – nothing was gained by it. The jewesses, sensing the fumes, started screeching inside the train, too. They hammered against the doors and knocked on the windows; they frightened the civilian residents along the way.
These hastily created corpses weren’t considered officially deceased.
The officially deceased were marked with the letter T in the record books – for Tot, dead – and were crossed off the list of the living. Those who voluntarily hung themselves got the emblem FT – Freitod, suicide. Others were noted with an Ex – Exekution – performed in accordance with some Gestapo court decision.
The corpses that had been rushed off to death in special trucks, trains and chambers were denoted in the books by the initials S.B. This must be read, Lord save me, not as Sruoga, Balys, but Sonder Behandlung – special treatment. Those unfamiliar with the Gestapo’s special language might make what they wished of this delicate title!
Sometimes a grieving woman would show up at the gates of the camp, wishing to possess at least the ashes of an only son, a dear brother, a beloved husband. This wish was always complied with. Money was demanded for the ashes, urn, packing and postage – this came to about 230 marks. The authorities would then give an order to scoop out a couple of kilograms of ash from the common pile of ashes, which were mailed to the grieving woman. Of course the authentic ashes of an individual were never sent out; this was impossible. Everyone’s ashes got mixed in the furnace. And by the time a request for ashes arrived, the dearly beloved had long since been strewn the devil knows where. How would you gather him up? But you don’t want to upset the woman. Isn’t it the same for her? Ashes are ashes.
Ashes were frequently requisitioned. To get 200 marks for a few leftover kilograms of ashes wasn’t a bad deal, but there had to be corpses!
1945
First published in Balys Sruoga, Dievu miskas, Chicago: Terra (1957).
Translated by Ausrine Byla.
Balys Sruoga (1896–1947) was a poet, symbolist, dramatist, critic, essayist, translator and one of the most colourful figures of inter-war Lithuanian cultural life. A professor at Vytautas Magnus University, he was the founder of the country’s first university theatre department and created the tradition of theatre criticism in Lithuania. His own dramatic works most often examined historical themes, delving into the decline of the political might of the Grand Duchy. During the Second World War he was arrested and incarcerated in Stutthof Concentration Camp, along with several other academics, for anti-Nazi resistance. This experience was the basis for his nonfiction work Forest of the Gods (Dievu miskas, written in 1945 and published in 1957), which, due to the interference of Soviet censors, was only published almost ten years after the author’s death.
1 During the Medieval and Renaissance period Walpurgis Night was an occasion when witches congregated to celebrate the coming of spring.